Savage Dragon Reacts to the Election! Badly!

I love Erik Larsen. Our babies will have fins.

Cat Burglar? But Cats are Idiots.

Here’s the deal: If you haven’t watched an Alfred Hitchcock film, ever, in your entire life, then you’re a Communist. It’s that simple.

To Catch a Thief stands testament to the simple fact that even Alfred Hitchcock’s worst is still way fucking better than the usual fare at the local cinematic slophouse. Here we have a story about a small town in France being plagued by a rash of burglaries. All fingers of the citizenry point to one John Robie (Cary Grant), a reformed cat burglar who is a party to many things in his current day-to-day, not one of them being crime. Robie knows he’s innocent, but he also knows that as long as the real culprit keeps aping his former patterns, his innocence is all but a fallacy to the local proles. With few alliances (the local constibulary not being one of them), he begins to take on the case himself, pitting his own skills against his imitator. If Hitchcock didn’t invent the Cat-And-Mouse chase, then consider this film an attempt at evolving it.

One thing that a film dork always expects from one of his films is the quirky-but-so-delicious photography and in presenting Robie’s Mediterranean playground he skips nary a beat from the clumped houses to the sprawling, crowded beaches, and the character-rich faces of Cannes society are here in a comic book crossection of eurotrash and Rockwellian madness. The trademark sense of humor is present as well: From the first shot of the French Travel Agency Placard that reads, “Welcome to France, We Hope You’ll Like it Here!” to the following cut of a screaming woman’s face. However, this movie differs in what a person might be used to from Hitch in that it is a remarkably “happier” story. Each character has their own undeniable charm, even those who would seek to foil the progress of the debonair lead.

Like I said before, some people might not get into it because of it’s more lighthearted tone. There’s a lot of love story between Robie and Frances Stevens (hawt), whose chemistry in these roles could be used to light a fucking forest fire, for sure. This is one of the movies that any classic film buff would throw at the face of Nicole Kidman whenever she tries to be Grace Kelly. It takes a bit more than perfect cheekbones to get a thermometer that high. The claims adjuster role played by John Williams (no, not that John Williams) aims for comfortable comic relief while supporting a large brunt of the plot. Personally, I like these kinds of capricious crime stories similar to Sherlock Holmes or The Sting as opposed to stark, gritty archetypes. So when I say that some won’t dig into this movie with both hands, I’m not one of them. I loved it.

Oh, why did I say that this was one of Hitchcock’s worst? Well, like I said, his worst is still better than the best of guys like Spielberg or Zemeckis. But man, it isn’t any North by Northwest. And when you compare those two, you see where his effort watermark lies.

To Catch a Thief gets an immovable 5 outta 5. I’ll be catching the original version of The Thomas Crown Affair sometime this week, hopefully. I’m tracing a theme, see?